Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Today's funeral arrangements

"We haven't come here to insult anybody, we have come here to tell you there's a different point of view than the one that the media have been pushing and ramming down our throats all the week.

"Our families are markedly insulted of the eulogising of a woman who absolutely destroyed our communities."

The words of miners’ union leader David Douglas, from a passionate address to the crowd in Trafalgar Square at an anti-Thatcher party on Saturday 13th, quoted in Morning Star Online. “Ex-miners have last word at capital party” was the headline.

Meanwhile Mark Rowe ‏@MarkRowe10 tweeted that when North Korean Kim Jong II died (Dec 2011) UK media ridiculed mourners saying they are all being forced to mourn with no dissent allowed.

Daily Telegraph: What about Clement Attlee?

But let's give the last word to the top Tories’ favourite paper. On 10th April The Daily Telegraph's columnist Peter Oborne dismissed as flimsy official denials that Thatcher is getting a state funeral. That's what it is, and it’s a mistake, he said. The decision to acknowledge Lady Thatcher, but not Clement Attlee, makes the Queen appear partisan. (Don't forget this is the Daily Telegraph and these things matter to them.)

Here's an extract:-

So the question arises: what’s so special about Maggie Thatcher? Defenders of next week’s funeral arrangements say that she was a “transformational” prime minister. This is true. But so was Clement Attlee, who introduced the welfare system and the National Health Service, thus fundamentally changing the connection between state and individual. Yet the Queen did not attend Mr Attlee’s funeral, a quiet affair in Temple Church near Westminster. According to a 1967 report in Time magazine, “all the trappings of power were absent last week at the funeral of Earl Attlee … there were no honour guards or artillery caissons, no press or television, no crush of spectators. Only 150 friends and relatives gathered for a brief Anglican ceremony in honour of the man who had shaped the political destiny of post-war Britain.”

The decision to acknowledge Lady Thatcher, but not Attlee, makes the Queen appear partisan and is totally out of kilter with the traditional impartiality of the modern British monarchy.

Poster circulated on social media that originally appeared on the front page of The Daily Telegraph (only joking)

No assistance for funerals

By the way, according to the Morning Star, miners' leader David Douglas claimed in his Trafalgar Square speech that during the 1984-85 mining strikes, Thatcher's government had "instructed the social security that no miner's families had to have assistance for funerals."

Uncanny echo of another Daily Telegraph article, this one from 16 July 2012. “Pauper's funerals increase as Government rejects half of welfare applicants” was the headline over a report of a sharp rise in pauper's funerals consequent upon the Government rejecting half of applicants for a state funeral grant. Maybe the Telegraph isn't such a bad paper after all. My Dad (which isn't a surprise) never read anything else. And my friend Mark reads it. For the sport, he says.